


And the Sky Fell When Autumn Came

by Miki_and_company



Series: Grim Tales [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Character Death, F/F, Gore, Short Story, Supernatural - Freeform, atmosphere fic, gothic as in the literary genre, gothic horror, halloween fic, not as like my immortal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-10
Updated: 2016-10-10
Packaged: 2018-08-20 15:18:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8253725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miki_and_company/pseuds/Miki_and_company
Summary: Last summer was the dark carnival, and we all did things we regretted. Of course, this was months ago. But the corpses that were made from it are as fresh as the leaves that have yet to touch the ground.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [daebaegod](https://archiveofourown.org/users/daebaegod/gifts).



> I guess this is a sort of pastiche of Thomas Ligotti and "The Shadow at The Bottom of the World", because I really liked the imagery and it felt like halloween.  
> I'm a sane person I swear.

It started well before October fell. Some would say it started in July, as the events took place, but none of us would tell you so. We would all tell you that it had always been, and if anything, it had climaxed terribly last July, and by the time Autumn came it would be done, we would have found the real we were always looking for.

But by October, though the sky greyed and the leaves warmed, nothing had changed.

Blind Terezi still stood for hours on end in the middle of the road, silent with guilt. Vriska refused to face what she did, and Dave still whispered to his “puppets” from daybreak to twilight.  
We were still lunatics. We still lived in ways that unsettled those who came upon us. We both relished in that fact and abhorred it.

But then one day we heard the cracks and rumbling of thunder in the distance. Though the storm never came. And the thunder never left. We listened to it carefully, hypnotized, kept out of our graves by this foreign sound. The pressure of the atmosphere rose around that time, and slowly but surely we realized it had become harder to breathe, that our bodies felt heavier and our mind had to fight to stay afloat.

It was perhaps mid-October when the idea came to me to visit Kanaya's grave in the forest's cemetary. The wooden cross that marked her last rest laid there, certainly, as expected.  
However, less expected was the violet strikes that covered it. When my eyes fell upon the vandalism, I froze. Slowly, I looked around the clearing, and in the light wind I saw, hanging from the trees, dangling ropes penduling circus clubs and soft-limbed puppets.

The area was silent as death, and I became aware of it when I could hear the beating of my heart, the irregularity of my breathing and the gentle shifting of my feet of the leaf bed. Not even the now familiar rumble of thunder could be heard.

“Dave?” I called.

“Terezi? Vriska?” I added for good measure.

I paused.

“Kanaya?” I whispered under my breath.

And following that name, I could have sworn the cross had moved.

My blood turned to ice without me wanting it: I have shame in admitting that my calm self, the one bent on embracing all things nefarious operating in our world could be unsettled, but I was.  
Just as I thought my conscience had recovered, the loud noise of a horn in the distance could be heard, and the goosebumps thus raised on my forearms sealed the deal I had unwillingly just made. 

The thunder resumed, but I already knew we were doomed.

It did not take long to operate. The first to fall was the very one who denied anything had ever happened. It was Vriska. She did not tell us anything about it, for we learned her troubles through the dark circles under her eyes and the way she looked wearily at mundane things as if they were to attack her unsuspecting self. The well, especially, frightened her. Every time she would approach it creaked in a harmonic dissonance with the permanent rumbling that accompanied ourselves. It was condemned, closed, yet it followed her. At random, it would hit her mind and she would mention it. Sometimes within a coherent thought, “Have you thought of checking the well? I think I saw a bird caught in it…we should go check the well.” Sometimes, her mouth would simply utter "The well...where...I…" before her gape would glaze with a thin layer of white.

Dave, who was already a lost cause, almost suffered a recovery along the lines of that time. He'd look at me or Terezi with sensible eyes, mumble, yes, but in the direction of us or himself. He even found comfort in holding onto me at night, sharing reflections about what great affliction it was that was upon us. We theorized about angry gods and engulfing shadows, about escaping fate and the persistent thought we might have been living at the end of the world, in a state between heavens and Earth, and that our bane was to be persistent though not truly ours: just the harvest of what others had sown for us in times too far back to remember. As Dave clung unto me, Terezi clung unto Dave, in her blindness seeing him as sane in ways I wasn't. 

Though she did throw a tantrum at the idea that Dave was seeing the “mortal” way again, lecturing him about how his eyes were ignorant and deceiving, about how a sane mind was nothing but one that refused to see the truth. Upon hearing these words, Vriska fell into a hysterical laughter which quickly dissolved into tears.

This may be unrelated, but the next day she disappeared. The well, condemned, had been undone, though we did not dare look at the bottom of it to verify had she jumped, had she joined the corpse that was already there.

It was truly late in October, so late in fact that it might have been November that I myself fell under the fever. I thought it wrong at first, but perspective allows me to understand there was no other way out. It had to happen. 

I woke up at daybreak perhaps, by then the day-night cycle had long stopped its regular agenda, and I woke up on the kitchen floor. 

Though it was freezing my body was burning, and my eyes, I am certain, not deceiving me showed Kanaya staring out the broken window, curtains flying around her. She stared silent in her death gown. I could not pin down how much I perceived her alive and how much I perceived her dead, but I did not care. I jumped at her madly, blissfully. I kissed her bloodied hands and clung to her neck, I intertwined my fingers in her black dress, I caressed her stone cold skin with what was left of my warmth. I thought her alive for a moment.

She would not look at me. Her glare was instead directed towards the field outside and would not flinch. So I looked outside. In the field there was no crops, but a single scarecrow stood still. Pecked on by birds. It painted a monochrome canvas of grey: from the sky to the earth, it looked hypnotizing.

Kanaya finally looked back at me, she took my hand. I exited the house dragging her and approached the scarecrow. It quickly became obvious that this scarecrow was in fact no scarecrow at all. But a wooden cross on which was hung Dave. 

Dead, naked and exposed to the elements such as the crows making a feast of his eyes, hands, and soon enough, entrails. 

I wanted to scream, I wanted to run, but instead my mind took hundreds of morbidly fascinated pictures: I noticed everything about him from the puce bruises on his chest to the soft droplets of semen making their way down his chin. I noticed the way his hair and his head undulated softly in the wind. 

It looked no less like a painting than it used to from a distance: though now my breathing that had been scarce all month was completely gone, as if I had inhaled the last few molecules of oxygen left in the universe. My sight grew acute and what a lesser Man would have seen as horrific became blissfully beautiful. I ran my fingers across his chest and giggled feebly.

It might have been an illusion, but I think I remember hearing Terezi's voice in the distance. It was yelling "I see! I see!"

I felt my undead lover's hand on my side. Kanaya. A part of me warned me to have caution of the unnatural, and yet another, stronger, urged me to take comfort in this familiar entity, to let her curve my body and draw her mouth close to my neck, where she could kiss it, where she could... 

Make be breathe. 

And she did. The last thing I remember was breathing, freely, feeling light, and free, and real. We were no longer bound to the forest, to the atmosphere, we did things-oh so sinful things. There was nothing to be afraid of. Except, perhaps, two blood-injected eyes that stalked us even as we were exposing ourselves. Except, maybe, blinded as we were, someone who could see.


End file.
